


If He's the Pranking Master, Then Who's Flying the Meteor?!

by satincolt



Category: Homestuck
Genre: April Fools' Day, Gen, I try to be funny but don't quite make it, Meteorstuck, fluffy meteor AU in which nothing hurts and everything's great
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 04:04:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1454704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satincolt/pseuds/satincolt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yet another meteor AU in which everyone's on the meteor and nothing hurts.  John goes a little bit nuts on April Fool's day and inadvertently triggers the Greatest Prank War in Paradox Space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If He's the Pranking Master, Then Who's Flying the Meteor?!

11:59. John stares at the clock, willing it to move faster.  Time is variable on the meteor, so sometimes the clocks do actually move faster. It seems like right now is not one of those times.  It feels like right now is one of those times where time moves like a sloth with hypothermia.

12:00. John leaps out of bed (silently, of course), flings his godhood back, and gathers the supplies from under his bed. Today is going to be _legendary_. 

xxx

“What. The everloving. _Fuck. Egbert!_ ”  John’s pulled awake by Karkat’s hoarse shout. The clock reads 7:28. He’s awake in time to watch the mayhem unfold.  His prankster’s gambit will be through the roof!

John trots to his doorway and leans carefully out to see Karkat, down the hall, clinging to his doorframe trying not to fall on the thousands of water-filled cups packing the hallway.  He stifles a snigger as the troll’s shaggy head whips around to fix him with a murderous grey glare.

“Are you fucking _kidding me_?” Karkat snarls. John nods, still holding back laughter. “What the hell is the point of this?”

“April Fool’s!” John exclaims, picking himself up with a gentle breeze and floating down the hallway. 

“Egbert, you get back here!” Karkat shouts as John drifts slowly past, sticking his tongue out.  “ _Fuck you and fuck your dumbass prankster’s gambit!”_

xxx

John fixes himself a bowl of cereal and waits for the rest of the meteor crew to wake up.  Distantly, he hears a shrill growl of frustration that has to be Vriska.  Everyone’s stuck until Jade wakes up and shrinks all the cups, but she’s a notoriously heavy sleeper.  They’ll be trapped in their rooms for an hour or more.  John giggles.

As if on cue, his Pesterchum lights up and starts pinging furiously. He’s bombarded by several angry, loquacious trolls all at once and they’re all caps-lock-screaming the same variations of “FUCK YOU.”

John looks up from his PDA as red and blue light start flickering at the end of the hallway across from the kitchen room.  Sollux floats into the kitchen blearily and drops into the chair across from John. He looks barely conscious.

“Want some cereal?” John offers.

Sollux nods and groans around a jaw-cracking yawn, running his hands through his hair. “What’s everyone so upset about?” he slurs, taking the bowl from John.

“I pranked them all really badly,” John grins.  “It’s going to be a while before they ge—”

A green flash lights up the hall.  Footsteps pound angrily down the metal-concrete surface, the rumbling traveling through to the kitchen.  It’s not at all unlike a stampede bearing down on John.

“Oh shit.”

John shoots straight up to the ceiling as most of the trolls, accompanied by Dave, Rose, and a very drowsy-looking Jade erupt into the kitchen in various states of irritation.

“What the _hell_ is April Fool’s?”

“Why were all those cups in the hallway?”

“ _You obnoxious prick!_ ”

“That had _better_ be the only prank you’ve got planned today!”

John waits until they’ve all shouted themselves out before coming back down to the table. Sollux is still eating his cereal placidly, completely oblivious to what’s going on.

“April Fool’s!” John shouts gleefully, throwing his arms wide like he wants to hug all of them.  They stare angrily. “It’s only one day, guys, come on! You can deal with a few pranks!”

“What the hell is April Fool’s, though?” Karkat asks again.

“It’s a human holiday where we all prank each other!” John explains.

“So we can prank you back?” Karkat’s eyes are narrow and calculating.

“Yep!” John agrees, smile faltering slightly. “You won’t be able to, though, because I am the pranking master.  I’m simply the best there is!”

“I see.” Rose rubs one eye but still manages to come off as vaguely threatening while doing so.  The look Rose is giving John makes him feel he’ll have to be on high alert for revenge pranks.  It’s not a good feeling.

The mob dissipates from the kitchen and John turns back to Sollux.  “How was your cereal?”

Sollux grunts noncommittally and dumps the bowl in the sink.  John stares at the troll.

“Something wrong?” Sollux asks after a good 45 seconds of uncomfortable staring.

“The cereal was shredded cardboard and diluted glue.  It’s not edible,” John says slowly.  Sollux shrugs.

“Eh, didn’t taste _that_ bad.” He slouches out of the kitchen, leaving John gawking at him from the table.

xxx

It takes the trolls and humans a depressing amount of time to find all John’s pranks. He lurks around the locations of several pranks in the morning, hoping to catch someone’s reaction to them, but his presence tips them off and they wisely steer clear of the blue-clad prankster. Around nine, he resorts to sitting completely still and silent on the couch in the common room as Rose writes more in her book and Dave and Terezi help the Mayor govern Cantown.

Then, suddenly, from the computer lab, John hears several irate voices.

“Why are there bean spurrouts in my keyboard?!”

“The letters are all wwrong; wwhat’s going on?”

“Why do these sheets of paper have human penises on them?”

And then, above all the other voices of confusion, “ _Jooooooohhhhhhhnnn!”_

John cackles and swoops into the computer lab.  Karkat is standing there, arms crossed, scowling viciously.  “ _Fix them._ ” He throws one clawed hand out and points to the bank of three computers at the back of the room that have been targeted.

Nepeta’s computer is untouched, but thousands of bean sprouts are growing out from under the keys of her keyboard.  She picks as many as she can away from the keys and munches, bemused, on a few. Equius, sitting off to her right, is fixing John with a stern glare over the top of his cracked shades.

Eridan holds up his keyboard to show John the letters have been rearranged to spell insulting messages. The deadpan look on his face shows he is clearly not amused.

Aradiabot is picking dick-decorated Post-It notes off the monitor of her computer and stacking them neatly off to the side in the corner of the room.  She doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, really.  John grins and shrugs at Karkat.

“I can’t fix the bean keyboard. You have to get a new one. Just pry the letters off and put them back in the right order, Eridan!” John instructs, zipping out of the lab before Eridan can raise the protest that some letters are duplicated or missing entirely.

“Aw man.”

“What _now?_ ” Karkat whips around, facing Sollux, ready to go bodily drag John Egbert back to the lab and force him to fix whatever juvenile and _highly unamusing_ pranks he’d pulled on Sollux’s computer.

“The CD tray ejected again,” Sollux says, pushing the tray back in with a metallic whine.  “I guess something’s wrong with the script.”

He pulls up the CD tray’s script and deletes a couple lines of code.  “Fixed,” he announces calmly.

John, hiding just behind the doorway, curses quietly.  That prank was so good! He had to look up special code to make the CD tray eject every five minutes.  It would’ve been the best prank yet!

Feeling disheartened, John is just about to retreat to the couch again when he hears a shriek from the kitchen. He races through the common room and notices Dave and Rose are gone.  Oh no.

John skids into the kitchen in record time to find Feferi clutching her heart in front of the open refrigerator. Bobbing grotesquely in a jar of cloudy green liquid is a severed human head.  The prankster grins—exactly the reaction he was going for with that prank! Feferi turns and notices John.

“John, what is this? Did you do this?” she demands, catching her breath.

“It’s just a prank, Feferi. It’s a prop head!” John plucks the jar out of the fridge and holds it up, tapping the side of the jar. He looks over at Feferi out of the corner of his eye.  Her face is becoming stormy. John tucks the jar under his arm like a linebacker and runs, the heiress shouting after him. As he runs, he laughs crazily.

In the next two hours, Jade falls victim to the no-lather soap (which John painted with clear nail polish); Tavros discovers the unpleasant surprise in a mixed bag of Skittles, Reese’s Pieces, and M&Ms and ends up gagging for fifteen straight minutes; a hungry Vriska chows down on half a dozen mayonnaise-filled doughnuts and promptly vomits; Rose ends up sanitizing her hands with personal lubricant, which she smears all over John in retribution.

Dave shouts from the bathroom that John is an asswipe— _literally—_ because he replaced the toilet paper with duct tape, and Kanaya comes after John with her chainsaw after he encased her sewing machine in Jello.

Right before noon, John’s last three pranks are discovered, but they backfire. Vriska discovers the alchemiter plastered in pictures of Nic Cage and spends several minutes fangirling violently before squirreling all the pictures away in her room.  Gamzee walks into the room with the airhorn rigged to the handle; when the horn blasts, everyone in the room shrieks and jumps _but_ Gamzee, who declares the airhorn is a “miraculous motherfuckin’ surprise.” 

The final insult to injury is Sollux.  He wanders into the kitchen, spies the “caramel apples” John made, and takes a huge bite out of one.  The revelation that the “apples” are actually caramel-covered onions doesn’t faze him. He shrugs down at the sticky-sweet onion and crunches his way through one, then takes another and meanders back to the computer lab.

“Why won’t he _be pranked?”_ John grumbles. The watch on his wrist reads 11:59. It’s too late for the rest of them to prank him!  After noon, April Fool’s is past and gone, prank someone and you’re the fool.  John’s safe. 

John cleans up the mess from making the caramel onions and makes his way to the common room.  The room is completely empty, but John can hear voices wafting down the halls from the bedrooms and computer lab.  Rose’s mug of tea is still steaming next to her book; doubtless she’s coming back in a moment. John peers in the doorway and sees the Mayor tidying up some chalk lines that make up the roads of Cantown.

“Have you seen the others?” John asks.  The Mayor turns, waves jocularly, then shrugs and returns to his mayoral duties. The prankster enters the room and browses the extensive DVD collection on the far wall, selecting a couple to watch. From his back pocket, his PDA pings.

turntechGodhead [TG] began pestering ectoBiologist [EB]

TG: hey john

EB: yeah Dave?

TG: can you come down to the ectobiology lab

TG: theres a huge fucking mess down here like you wouldnt believe and we need you to do the windy thing and clean it up

EB: we?  who’s we?

TG: me and jade 

TG: were trying to see if we can scavenge some parts for the alchemiter

EB: ok! 

ectoBiologist [EB] ceased pestering turntechGodhead [TG]

John pockets his PDA, sets his movies carefully on the desk next to Rose’s book, and sets off to the ectobiology lab.  He’s halfway down the massive stairwell when he hears a _honk_ and quickly suppressed laughter echo out of the darkness below. He pauses, listening intently, frozen halfway between steps, hand pressed against the wall.  Slowly, he inches closer to the treacherous, railing-less edge of the stairs, peering down into the oppressive darkness swallowing the core of the meteor. 

Nothing but stale air and black so final it sears his retinas greets him. Right before the ectobiology lab, the stairwell has sheared off, like a massive chunk of it fell into the black hole at the bottom of the stairwell in an earthquake. John’s surprised Jade and Dave managed to get into the lab; he’s been the only one able to access it because he can fly over the huge gap.  Well, maybe Jade or Aradiabot or Sollux could find a way to get across the gap, but they haven’t shown any interest in the lab.  As far as John knows, there’s nothing in the lab that would be compatible with the alchemiter—and there’s nothing wrong with the alchemiter either. It’s upgraded as much as possible and it’s also fully functional.  They have enough grist in their combined hoard to recreate an entire planet and then some. That laughter earlier didn’t sound like Gamzee’s raw-throated chuckle, either.  It sounded more like Terezi’s shrill cackle; before it was cut off, that is.  Gamzee lurks around in the depths of the meteor, but Terezi, she sticks to the surface or with Dave. So why didn’t Dave mention Terezi was in the lab with him and Jade?

John creeps into the doorway of the ectobiology lab, relieved to see Dave standing in front of a tangled mess of wires.  Some look frayed, like he’s tried to hack through the knot spilling down from the ceiling with his sword.

“Help a bro out?” he asks, gesturing to the mess.

“Sure. Just stand out of the way.” John raises his arms, calling all the air to him.  It whirls through the room and rips the knot neatly away, tossing it into the corner. Just as the wind is dying down, John is hit with something unpleasantly warm and disgustingly sticky.

“Augh!” he cries out, trying to shake it off him.  Before he can move, though, he feels ropes surround him. The world flips upside down and whatever slime John was drenched in drips into his eyes.  He blinks furiously and struggles to free a hand to wipe the sweet slime— _is it the slime from the Hellacious Blue Phlegm Aneurysm Gushers oh my god it is—_ off his face, but just succeeds in struggling like a slime-drenched idiot suspended from the ceiling.

“Cue the glitter!” Jade shouts from somewhere below him.

“Not the glitter!  Not the glitter!” John shouts hoarsely, spitting Gusher slime out of his mouth.

“An admirable Nic Cage reference, Egbert, but that won’t save you this time!” Vriska crows, right before John feels a metric ton of glitter hit him from all angles. It goes up his nose and chafes at his arms where they’re trapped under the ropes.

“You all are assholes!” he shouts, spitting more slime and glitter at them. “Joke’s on you suckers, ‘cause it’s after noon!  Rules of April Fool’s!”

“Oh, but it’s still 11:59, John,” Rose says smugly. 

“That’s impossible!  It was 11:59 ten minutes ago!” John protests.

“It is 11:59,” Aradiabot chimes in mechanically.  “As a time player and a precisely calibrated robot I can verify this.”

_Fuck meteor time._

“Say cheese, Egbert!  This one’s for the record!” Dave shouts over John’s curses and struggles. 

“Alright, you had your fun, now let me fucking _go!_ ” John shouts.  Fifteen voices laugh at him outrageously.

“No way! You’re going to have to get down on your own!  Have fun getting back up to the common room,” Vriska says ominously.  John can almost see her flipping her hair haughtily as she walks out.

“Wait! No!  At least tell me who did this!” John cries desperately after them. They pause in the doorway. Slowly, one set of feet approaches John, then comes to a stop right in front of him.

“I did.”

_Sollux.  Motherfucking.  Captor._

“You see, John, I invented the concept of pranking,” Sollux explains simply, floating up to John’s level with a crackle of psionics. “I am therefore the pranking master.” He circles John slowly, then whispers in his ear, “ _I am simply the best there is._ ”

Sollux laughs nasally and leaves.  The group’s voices slowly fade as they ascend the stairwell back up to the living areas.

“ _I swear I will have my vengeance_ ,” John hisses.

xxx

Just after 2:00, John staggers into the common room, still very sticky and slimy. He glares around at everyone overdramatically, then flounces off to his room to clean up, leaving the assembled trolls and kids tittering at him.

And that was how the greatest prank war in paradox space was started.

**Author's Note:**

> Sollux's line "I invented the concept of _____!" is an infamous quote from my friend pageofbrea2t2 because, apparently, in a dream once Sollux said to her very haughtily "I invented the concept of numbers!" and that took on a life of its own.


End file.
